When I was 10 years old, I remember looking at the lean, toned bodies of professional runners on the cover of Runners’ World. Seeing those photos sparked a desire in me to not only look like those runners, but to eat like them. My thought process at the time was simple: I want to be a pro runner, so I will emulate that lifestyle as much as possible. If I want to be like them, I need to live like them–train, eat, sleep, etc. Now the danger in this mindset isn’t that professional runners live an unhealthy lifestyle. It’s that I expected my body to look like theirs, and if it didn’t, I was doing something wrong.
I would scour the internet for “what I eat in a day” articles about professional runners and read them like the Bible. The trouble is, I wasn’t reading them to make sure I was eating healthy or enough, I was looking through those to check that I was eating little enough. Because those pro runners had visible abs, toned arms, lean legs, I only had one goal in my head: be lean. While it was difficult to replicate the intensive and high-volume training, the attention to recovery (massage, PT, athletic training, etc), or the highly specified strength training, to me, I could be a pro runner if I just looked like one. So I chased that look relentlessly, truly believing that was what was best for my athletic success. The trouble is that I was 10. My body wasn’t meant to look like it had been trained at the highest level for over a decade. Attempting to emulate a look only weakened it, making it difficult to handle the training load that I had dreamed about. The well-meaning food articles only convinced me to eat less and less. The photos of runners I saw online only convinced me of more and more flaws in myself. The media that desperately tried to spread positive messaging sent me into a spiral.
I don’t say any of this to blame Runners’ World or the professional runners who have graced its cover. I say this to emphasize it often doesn’t matter the goal of the media, a consumer will reap what they want to from it. Confirmation bias–I would interpret articles to confirm what I already believed, not look for information that could prove otherwise. That’s why, when I post content about food or body image, I am so careful to not give even a whiff of “if you looked like this…” or “I shouldn’t eat that..” Even with this care, I realize that posting content about food is always a risk, and that’s why I try to use those posts to emphasize messaging around trusting one’s body, staying in energy balance, and not restricting any foods or food groups. I’m not perfect, and I don’t expect mainstream media to be, but the level of care around these topics needs to be increased.
Watch the video below to see an example of how I share some snippets into what I eat.
